Corbett signs death warrant in ’82 stabbing death

Governor Tom Corbett has signed an execution warrant for a man convicted in the 1982 stabbing death of a young mother in Lebanon County.

Freeman May, now 55, is scheduled to be executed on March 5. He is currently incarcerated in the State Correctional Institution at Greene.

May is on death row for the murder of 22-year-old Kathy Lynn Fair, a Lancaster woman who went missing in September 1982. Six years later, in 1988, her skeletal remains were
discovered in a remote, wooded area of South Lebanon Township.

Three months after Fair's disappearance, two young women identified May as the man who attacked and left them for dead not far from where Fair's
remains were later discovered. May, who had given the 15- and 19-year-old a ride home from a party, repeatedly stabbed the young women and raped one of them. He was convicted and sentenced to 15 to 35
years in prison for the crime.

May was arrested and charged with killing Fair in 1990. He was convicted the following year during a trial in which his brother and wife testified that he had
confessed to each of them that he murdered a girl and buried her body in the woods.

May's death sentence was reversed by an appeals court, but he was again sentenced to death in
December 1995. After an appeals court vacated the death penalty a second time, May was sentenced to death a third time in
October 2008.